Three Blind Mice

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

See how they run. See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer’s wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a sight in your life,

As three blind mice?

When I was just a tiny tot, my Grandmother we named "Bumby" sang us this nursery rhyme.  The song was upbeat and perky.  It was very uplifting and invoked upon the listener a sense of happiness, peace and calm.  Yeah, no.  Nursery rhymes were disturbing, dark, and twisted.  

Practically speaking, however, rats and mice are vermin.  I make it part of my mission statement to eradicate (e-rat-icate) them from our property.  When the weather begins to cool, they seek refuge in our barn.  The barn is cozy, filled with hay for the winter - perfect for rat nests.  There is always some leftover grain that the rats devour.  They are nasty animals.  They carry disease.  They pee on the hay.  They make a mess.  Therefore, they must go.

I am not going to cut off their tails with a carving knife.  I trap them in my heavy duty rat traps.  These traps are deadly.  I bait the traps by smearing chunky peanut butter on them and set the trap.  You must be very careful.  If the hair-trigger goes off and snaps on your finger, it will break bones.  In the last six days, I have ended the lives of four rats...

SNAP!

CRACKLE!

POP!

These were all young rats.  Where young ones are, there are older ones.  I'll keep trying to kill them.  I don't want them blind.  I want them dead.  Perhaps listening to dark nursery rhymes as a child affected my civility.

We're Caught in a Trap

"We're caught in a trap

I can't walk out

Because I love you too much, baby

Why can't you see

What you're doing to me

When you don't believe a word I say?"

-Elvis Presley "Suspicious Minds"

We have two separate varmint problems going on simultaneously.  It is high time to get the problems under control.  First, in our barn, we have a rat problem.  The infestation has gone from bad to worse in recent days.  I have caught several young ones by simply placing a bucket against the wall in the feed room.  Young rats jump in and cannot jump back out.  I then ensure their jumping days are over.

We've caught several rats in buckets full of water.  Apparently rats get thirsty and lean over the water bucket to drink and fall in.  Unable to climb out on the slick sides of the bucket, they drown.  We've caught several by NOT killing a rat snake that has made our barn his home.  The snake is like a heat-seeking missile and is knocking off the rats one by one.

I took out a small animal cage and baited it with dog food, thinking it would add one more rat eliminator alternative.  So far, so good.  I've trapped three in three consecutive nights.

He realizes the gig is up!

You dirty rat!

Rats cause a sanitary problem in the barn.  I like to clean them out prior to storing hay in the barn.  Cleaning them out is easier said than done.  The barn borders a patch of woods an a lot of rats live in the woods and move in the barn when colder, inclement weather sets in.  Just this evening, I took my Marlin .22 rifle loaded with rat shot and killed three rats by shooting them off the rafters.  We're slowing thinning out the population and having success, but we still have a lot of rats to kill.  We'll keep at it.

One of our trapping operations, however, is not so successful.  We lost a laying hen the other night to a predator - an old possum.  I got out my large animal trap and baited it with dog food.  I walked out to the woods and set the trap right on a trail leading out of the woods to our pasture.  This morning... BINGO!  I noticed that I had caught something in our trap.  Uh oh!  I caught our neighbor's cat!

The cat was very unhappy and was hissing at me and carrying on.  I quickly released the fierce and ferocious feline, after asking the cat not to "rat" me out to the neighbors.  The cat was none the worse for wear and after giving me an evil look, he ran back to the neighbors property.

I don't give up easily.  I'll keep my trapping exploits up and running until I eliminate the rat and possum problems.

I Should Not Have Done It

This afternoon we called the cows in at milking time.  It was a very hot day today, and of course Rosie was laying in the mud.  While Tricia gave her a bath outside the barn so we could milk her, I mixed up the feed in the feed room.  Something made me look in the corner behind the roll of barbed wire and on the side of the old freezer we use to store feed in.  Something was there that looked out of the ordinary.  Was it a rat?  It was too dark to see in the shadows.  I went and got a shovel.

My thought process went something like this.  What if it is a rat?  I hate rats in our barn and want to kill every last one of them.  What if it is a snake?  Even though they kill rats, they also eat eggs and most importantly, it could scare Tricia and that wouldn't be a good thing to have her afraid to come to the barn.  I quickly weighed the alternatives in my mind and made my decision.

One swift strike of the shovel resulted in a swift strike in return from a... chicken snake.  A big one.  It had a huge bulge in its stomach I assumed from eating some of our chicken eggs.  I picked up the injured snake and threw him out of the barn near where Tricia was finishing up washing Rosie.  She said, "That's a big snake.  I was wondering what was taking you so long in there!"  I told Tricia that the snake was fat and must have a few of our eggs in him.  Tricia didn't think it looked like eggs.  I cut the snake in half right above the bulge.  What is that thing?!

I stepped on the snake and something big and slimy oozed out.  Well, Tricia was right.  It was a big, fat rat!

I guess the snake had feasted on one of the rats in the barn and was settling down in the corner to digest its meal when I made the discovery.  How did the snake fit that big ol' rat in his stomach?  Better yet, how did it open it's mouth wide enough to eat it?

After my dissection of the snake was complete, Tricia told me that if the snake wouldn't bother her, she would have been fine with me leaving him alone so that he could wolf down more rats in the barn.  It was too late, though.  The chickens were already pulling the guts out of the snake.  Well, I'm sure there are more chicken snakes out there that will be attracted to the rats in the barn.  So maybe the next guy won't meet such an untimely end. 

Every Rose Has Its Thorns

I remember there was a children's book about a king that liked cheese, but mice were eating it.  So he got a cat.  That took care of his mouse problem, but he didn't want cats around, so he got dogs.  The dogs made the cats leave, but he really didn't want dogs.  So he got an elephant, which got rid of the dogs, but what do you do with an elephant?  So he re-introduced mice which again started eating his cheese.  A very circular story about unintended consequences.

The owner of the farmland across the road sold his farm to a developer who is going to make a big subdivision out of it.  We talked about that in an earlier post.  We weren't thrilled about this, but what can you do?  The developer plowed the land. The farmland that had laid fallow for years and had grown up in weeds chest-high was now plowed smooth.  This displaced every critter that had made his home there, including rats.  They all, I presume, packed their luggage and moved on over to our place.

Our cats that were 16 years old both died, leaving us with no defenses.  The battalions of rats flanked us and in blitzkrieg fashion, stormed over the line, setting up a command post in our attic.  One day Tricia said, "Kyle, our telephone isn't working."  We called a repairman and he discovered that rats had eaten through the telephone wires in the attic.  What a mess!  So we got these two with the quickness.

It took them only a matter of weeks before we found them entertaining a rat and then killing it.  The Rat Killers are working!  But there's always unintended consequences.

Our youngest son began to complain about some bumps in his arm and this concerned us. We took him to our family doctor and Benjamin was diagnosed with Cat Scratch Fever.  So we have our rat problem solved, but now we have cat scratch fever.  So, I guess now, in keeping with the story line of the book, we need dogs and then an elephant?  I think not.  We'll take the cats to the vet and if the cat scratch fever doesn't go away, we'll use antibiotics.

An Epitath For A Rat

One of the reasons that I gave up on having an above-ground compost pile and resorted to trench composting is the rat problem.  We live in the country and are surrounded by woods and fields and so they are everywhere.  I don't want to put out poison as I don't want our chickens getting into it by mistake.  Our two rat-killers (cats) are still too young to put a dent in the rat population, but I see that changing soon.

Aside from just being nasty critters, carrying disease and whatnot, rats are beginning to cause problems in our garden.  We didn't get a single cantaloupe this year.  The rats devoured them all!  You can see below how they ate up this butternut squash before I could harvest it.  Of all things - eating our butternut squash!  Of course you know, this means war...

Although we don't eat the birdhouse gourds, they also fell prey to rats as well.  This birdhouse gourd won't be converted into a birdhouse thanks to those pesky rats. Okay, so enough of this!

I set out 3 predator cage traps of all different sizes in the garden baited with the leftovers of our catfish courtbouillion supper, but caught nothing.  I figured the 'fishy' smell would attract them.  It did not.  I don't give up that easily, however. The next night I baited the traps with some Ol' Roy dog food.  Bingo!  Got Em!  The dog food that Sam Walton fed to his dog, Roy, proved to be the rat's un-doing.

He (or she) looked up at me with begging eyes, hoping that I would show some sympathy or compassion.  Not a chance.  This guy, or some of his family members, have wreaked havoc in the garden this year.  For that crime, he'll pay with his life.

It is hard to get perspective, but this is a big old rat.  He measured 16 inches long from nose to end of tail.

To the victor goes the spoils.  This time, I was the victor and the spoils were that the rat became compost material that is buried beneath the okra rows.  Hopefully, I'll catch many more, eradicating the rat population and giving me free organic fertilizer.  I took off my boutonniere and tossed it in the hole.

I was so moved by the burial of the rat, I wrote a eulogy for him:

Here lies the rat that came out of the woods to eat our butternut squash,

He didn't expect a varmint trap that gave him the kibosh,

I call him 'he,' but I'm not sure if 'he' was a girl or a boy,

His final meal was a delectable treat of dog food named 'Ol Roy.

I'll bait the traps again and again until I catch them all.

For we have more produce coming in from our garden for the fall.

Ashes to ashes, Dust to Dust - the rat gets buried in the ground,

The same fate waits for all the other rats that choose to come around.

Rat Killers

It has been almost 3 complete years since our two cats died.  Sheltie and Christie were sisters and were 13 years old when the last of their 9 lives expired.  We've missed having cats around. We've also missed their ferocious desire to hunt out and kill rats, birds and the occasional squirrel.

Since their demise, the rats have grown in number.  As they say, "When the cat's away, the mice play." We've seen the population of rats in the barn skyrocket and have even seen a few in the garage.   It was high time that we restored order around here.  We began looking around for kittens and found a couple of kittens from a friend on Tricia's facebook.  The kittens were sisters.  A few days ago they brought over a laundry basket of kittens and Russ and Benjamin each picked out one.

Russ' kitten is the one on the left and Benjamin's is the one on the right.  They are living in the garage for now, but we'll introduce them to the barn at some point.

At first we were a little concerned about how they would fare with Big Boy, our Great Pyrenees dog.  Big Boy makes sport of chasing down and violently killing possums, rabbits and other varmints.  We were thinking that Big Boy may enjoy eating our new kittens, so we kept the kittens in a kennel for a few days.  Then we released them while we kept a close eye on Big Boy so he wouldn't snack on the kittens.  Believe it or not, Big Boy wasn't interested.

How could you eat a kitten in a Croc?  Really...

For some reason they like sitting in my Crocs.

I have made a personal note to make sure I check the Crocs before putting my feet in them.  The kittens show lackluster skills in using a litterbox that the boys set out in the garage and I don't want to find a 'surprise' when I slip my feet into the Crocs.

Although I'm not a cat person, I have to admit that they are kind of cute.  They need to grow up quickly though.  Some of the rats on the property are much bigger than them.  The cats will have to earn their keep around here by putting a dent in the rat population.  We'll be anxious to see how our new Rat Killers perform.

Don't Go Swimming For at Least 30 Minutes After Eating

Don't go swimming for at least 30 minutes after eating or you could get stomach cramps and drown! That is something that I used to hear all the time as a kid.  We didn't have the Internet in the 70's and 80's.  If we did, we could have googled it and learned as I just did from this article that that little piece of advice was a myth and that they can't find one documented death caused by swimming after eating. Just think of all the extra time we could have enjoyed swimming as kids in the summer if we had known better.

Well, for the past week I have found documented evidence that the "myth" that says that we shouldn't swim for 30 minutes after we eat may not be a myth after-all.  In fact I have documented proof of an experiment done using lab rats (okay, maybe they aren't lab rats) in the photo below.  This settled science has not been peer-reviewed, but the picture below is hard to refute.

This rat needed a life preserver

We showed you back in this post from June how we ferment rice to be used for chicken feed.  Each morning and night we soak rice in buckets of water.  Rats from the barn smell the fermenting grain, jump into the buckets of water to eat and then drown.  Over the past few days, I have extracted a total of four drowned rats from the rice bucket once I drain the water out.

Each morning, I toss the water-logged and very dead rats out in the barnyard to the omnivorous chickens who make a quick meal of the drowned rats marinated overnight in fermented rice 'wine'. Tasty!  Why, the fermenting rice bucket has turned into a veritable buffet line of grains and meats for the chickens! Remember kids, swimming and eating don't mix!  (For rats, at least.)

Removing the Rodents

The barn has long been a haven for rodents.  Every year I kill them and for a while, I see neither hide nor hair of the filthy animals.  There are woods nearby, so I assume more come out of the woods to re-populate our comfortable barn.  So the work of rate removal is never done.  It is a task that stretches out in perpetuity.  For some strange reason, rat traps don't work too good.  The rats seem to be too smart to be caught.

But they have to be eliminated.  They nest up in the loft on top of the hay.  They roam the barn floor at night, looking for morsels of feed or rice that the cows or chickens have dropped.  When we come in the barn and turn on the lights, the rats scurry up into the rafters and into the hay for cover.  The trouble with the disgusting creatures is that they pee on the hay and then the cows won't eat it.  That won't do.  The rats must be killed.

The best method of rat killin' I've had success with has been with my old Marlin .22 lever action rifle loaded with rat shot - or pest control shot, as it is officially called.  I walked out to the barn at around 10 pm, turned on the lights and watched the rats run.  Go ahead, make my day, night.

Two shots and two juvenile rats take a permanent dirt nap.

You Dirty Rats

I picked them up, skinned them and dressed them out and brought them in to Tricia.  She usually seasons them, dredges them in flour and then pan fries them in a cast iron skillet.  I'm just joking, of course.  I went out again tonight to kill more, but they were still gun-shy from the death of their friend from last night and I didn't see or hear anything.  They stayed hidden.  I know they are there, though, biding their time.  I'll be back in a couple of days to finish what I started.

The Perfect Trap

Three blind mice,

Three blind mice,

See how they run,

See how they run, 

They all ran after the Farmer's Wife

Who cut off their tails with a butcher knife,

You've never seen such a sight in your life as three blind mice.

That is a crazy nursery rhyme.  It is sung with such upbeat happiness and the mixture of joy and violence sung to young children is odd, really.  You know the tune as it was the theme song for the "3 Stooges" television program.  But then there's the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch was fattening up the children to put them in the oven to eat!  Talk about a macabre thing to read to children.

Back to the rodents.  No, Tricia is not cutting off their tails with a butcher knife.  But it is Spring and the rats are having babies.  Lots of them.  Last year we were having a rat problem in our barn.  I was shooting them off the rafters with my .22 loaded with rat shot.  It was great fun, but I was unable to get them all.  I caught a few in a cage type trap.  You might remember I researched and saw that others were having great success catching rats in this trap that I wrote about building it in this post:  A Better Rat Trap  That trap caught exactly ZERO rats.  I don't know why it didn't, but with persistence and help from a couple of hungry cats, I was able to almost eliminate the rat problem last year, but as described above, they're back.

I resorted to an old, trusty, cheap, tried-and-true method of killing rats.  It only involves a bucket, a board, and some rice.  I've killed 6 young rats in three days and I've seen two more scurrying away as I opened the feed room, so I know there's more.  See the little critters?  No, they're not cute.  They're not sleeping either. When I open the door to the feed room and see the victims in my trap, they quickly meet their end by the end of a 2x4.  Then they are tossed out, along with the rice, for the chickens to devour.

Two Rats in the "Trap" Post Mortem

Here is the makeshift trap all set.  All it is is a bucket with rice in the bottom pushed against the wall with a board leaning against the bucket to act as a ramp.  The critters climb up the ramp, smell the rice, jump down in the bucket, eat their fill, and then realize that they cannot get out.  They jump and jump to no avail.  That's where I come in.

The one drawback to this trap: This works on young rats only.  Larger ones can jump out of the bucket.  It is amazing how high a mature rat can jump.  I've used taller buckets and caught bigger rats, but my rate of catch was never as good as the standard 5 gallon bucket on the young rats.  Probably because the younger rats are stupid and not as street-wise as the older ones, coupled with the fact that perhaps the taller your bucket, the further they have to jump down and maybe that discourages them and/or maybe the taller the bucket, the scent of the rice in the bottom is weaker and doesn't draw them in as much.  In any event, the 5 gallon bucket trap is the cat's meow (ha ha!) when it comes to rat killin'.

The trap is set

And here is a panoramic shot of the trap, showing bucket, ramp, rice and two dead rats. Lovely, isn't it? You can do this too with things you have at your house.  It works for mice as well as rats and it's great family fun.

A Panoramic view

Hey, if you can sing 3 Blind Mice to a child or read them Snow White in which the queen asks the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her lungs and liver in a box, you can surely teach them the very useful skill of rat killing that they'll be able to take with them into adulthood.  Rats left unchecked multiply and make a real mess, destroying property, stinking up the place, and potentially carry disease.  Happy Hunting!

Building a Better Rat Trap

We continue to wage our War on Rats in our barn with sporadic and limited success. Benjamin has shot a few off the rafters with rat shot. The elusive vermin somehow are too smart to go into a standard rat trap or a glue trap. I don't want to use poison as I don't want our chickens to eat the poisoned dead rats and end up having poison residue in the eggs that we eat.

At one point we had pretty much wiped them out, but with the onset of colder weather, I can only assume our barn with a hayloft full of hay looked like a sunny beach in South Florida to someone living in the North as rats from the neighboring woods appear to be wintering in the loft.  I saw several rats with Hawaiian shirts, RayBan's, and flip flops unpacking in our barn.  They are not good housekeepers and they are leaving their 'calling cards' everywhere.

Rat poop in the feed room

So I began looking for new and creative rat eradication techniques and I stumbled on the homemade rat trap idea below by searching on YouTube.  All you need is a 5 gallon bucket, an empty broth or tomato sauce can, some heavy wire, or in this case a skewer, some peanut butter and water.  Simply drill a couple of holes on opposite sides of a bucket.  Punch a hole in the center of a can with liquid in it and drain out the contents. Punch another hole in the bottom of the can.  Now run your wire/skewer through one side of the bucket, then through and through the can and then through the other side of the bucket.  The can should spin freely on the skewer.  Bend the wire/skewer to secure it to the backside of the bucket.  Liberally slather the can with peanut butter.  Fill the bucket at least halfway with water and lean a piece of a board against the top of the bucket to make a ramp for the rats/mice.

A better mouse trap?

The idea is that the peanut butter will lure the rats to climb up on the bucket.  When they climb on the lip of the bucket and run across the skewer to get the peanut butter, they'll step on the can to start snacking and the can will spin and dump them into a watery grave.  (C'mon in.  The water's fine.)

A bird's eye view

Hopefully in a few days I'll post some pictures of a rat or two swimming in the bucket.  

Getting Rid of Undesirables in the Barn

The other night we were watching an episode of The Waltons where the Mom and Dad were going on a trip and left Grandma and Grandpa to watch all the kids.  At some point a skunk somehow got into the house and sprayed and the whole family had to sleep in the barn.

The next scene showed the family comfortably nestled in an impeccably clean barn.  The cows and chickens were in there with them, but amazingly, there were no cow pies or chicken poop.  Nor were the animals urinating on the hay.  I didn't see any spider webs or dust in the Walton's barn.  No rats, either.  What's up with that?  Tricia looked at me and said, "If a skunk got in our house, I don't think we could sleep in our barn.  Too many critters out there!"

She's right.  Currently there is a plague of mosquitoes of Biblical proportions around our place.  In the barn they are ferocious.  As we try to milk, they attack and bite our ankles, driving us crazy.  They land on the cows, suck their blood and then fall into the milking bucket.  The muslin rag catches them prior to falling in the milk, but you still must be VERY careful not to burst the mosquitoes as you remove them.  We do position a couple of box fans to blow them away while we're milking, but that is a temporary fix.  Below you can see the mosquitoes covering the wall.  If you'd slap them, they'd leave a big red mark as most are filled with blood.

A wall of mosquitoes

Unlike the Waltons, we do have cobwebs in our barn.  Although the photo of the spider web below is blurry, you can still see that the spider that spun that web is not going hungry any time soon with all the mosquitoes in it.  This was just one of many webs in our barn, so spiders are doing their part to help out.

A meal for the spiders

We decided that we'd give the spiders a little help and I plugged in a 'Bug Zapper' in the barn to kill mosquitoes.  Unfortunately, the sheer magnitude of mosquitoes overwhelmed the zapper.  If you look closely, you can see all the electrocuted mosquitoes cooked onto the lamp.  No more mosquitoes could be zapped because it was so filled up with dead ones.  I had to get the leaf blower to blow them off so we could zap a bunch more the next night.

Clogged up bug zapper

Mosquitoes aren't the only undesirables, though.  We've got rats in the barn, too.  Benjamin and I have been going out every night with a .22 loaded with rat shot.  We've got a long way to go, but we're putting a dent in the rat population.  Below you can see a poor male rat that suffered an untimely bout with 'lead poisoning.'

You dirty rat!

Even though we're slowly getting rid of the critters in our barn, we're a long way from being able to sleep in there.

Not getting away this time

A while back I posted that we are in the process of weaning Annie, Nellie's little kid.  I read that it is best if you separate them, but allow them to see each other, so I built a temporary pen with some livestock panels. Two of them were hog panels, though, that aren't as tall as a cattle panel.  Annie quickly escaped from that pen.

This week I called my neighbor and asked if I could borrow a couple of cattle panels that I saw stacked on a trailer in his back yard.  No problem, he said, come and get them.  It is good to have good neighbors!  In no time I replace the shorter panels with the taller ones and moved Annie back in.  Guess what?  She couldn't jump out of this pen.

Too tall to jump outta this pen.

The only problem is that there is no shade and Annie was getting hot.  Benjamin moved her back to the barn. In the evening I got a blue tarp and fastened it in a corner to provide some shade.  Problem solved.  She's a happy little goat now.  Benjamin & Tricia cut some branches for her to nibble on.  Nellie comes by to check on her little girl and will sit by her pen dutifully for a while before going about her daily routine of grazing.  I'm going to do some more research to see how long it takes to wean a goat.  This is our first time weaning a goat, so I'm not very knowledgeable about it.

When I went into the feed room at the barn, I saw that I had caught another rat in the cage trap I have in there baited with pecans.  I picked up the cage, shook it up real good to stun the rat and then opened the trap door on the cage and tossed it into the barnyard.  All the chickens came running and Sally was the quickest one and ran off with her tasty snack.

Fresh killed rat for supper.  Yum Yum

Sally took off running with her supper with all the other chickens giving chase.  After eating the rice I throw them every day, I guess a little protein (in the form of a rat) is a change of pace and puts some variety in the menu.

Finders keepers - losers weepers

Rats in our Barn's Feed Room

We have two 'outside cats' that we feed, but don't feed them a whole lot.  We want to encourage them to make something of themselves and to be gainfully employed as rat control specialists.  The idea is that if we give them less cat chow, then they'll supplement with RAT chow.  They do, especially in the fall/winter months, bring their dead prey to our door step.  It is quite nasty to step out first thing in the morning and have a mangled rat on your back door Welcome mat, but, well...  That's life in the country.

In the summer months our cats aren't industrious and spend most of their time napping in the shade.  Meanwhile the rat population grows.  We just stacked 100 bales of good hay in the loft in our barn and (there's no nice way to say this), I don't want rats pooping and peeing on the cow's hay.  Rats also carry disease and stink.  An abundance of rats will likely attract snakes and hawks which don't mix well with our chickens, the hen's eggs (and my wife).

When I walked into the feed room in the barn the other day, rats had chewed through the bag of alfalfa hay and had made a big mess.  You can see their calling cards - rat droppings, in the photo below.


Rat Droppings in the feed room

In previous posts I showed you how we use rat shot from a .22 rifle to shoot the rats off of the rafters in the barn.  When we turn the lights in the barn, the rats scurry and I shoot and kill them.  Well, I'm out of rat shot and the hardware store was out as well, so let's try Plan B.  A buddy of mine loaned me a small animal trap.  Let's put a dent in the rat population, shall we?

I have the trap baited and the door is open and the trigger is set.


Baited trap that is set and ready

Here is a closer look.  You can see that I've cut a bite off of a hot dog and thrown it to the back of the cage.  You can see the trigger just to the left of the wiener.  The rat will smell the hot dog and enter the trap to eat via the open door.  When the rat steps on the metal 'pad' to get over to the bait, it triggers the door to close behind it, thus trapping the rat.

Hot Dogs!  Get your hot dogs here!

In the morning we could hear movement in the feed room, alerting us to the fact that we had captured a rat.  Yes indeed.  A young Norway Rat.  I don't speak Norwegian, so I don't know exactly what he was saying, but you can tell by the look in his eye that he knows he has made a mistake that will cost him dearly.  While he might have escaped our lazy cats, he fell prey to the trap. 


Rats!

I read on victorpest.com that Norway rats can have 8 - 12 'pups' per litter and can have 4 - 7 litters per year.  If my math is correct and I use the conservative ends of the statistics mentioned above, each female can deliver 32 babies a year.  Those babies reach sexual maturity in 2 - 3 months. 

Translation: If you don't do something about it, you have a big problem on your hands.

I shook the rat swiftly in the cage to stun him and then dumped him out on the ground.  Perspective is an interesting thing.  What you and I see as an ugly animal with a long tail, the chickens see as supper.  Sorry I didn't capture any photos of that macabre spectacle.  

The only good rat is a dead rat

I'll continue to mix up my arsenal of shooting them with rat shot, using conventional snap traps, as well as using the nifty cage trap my buddy let me borrow to keep the population under control.  In less than a week, the scorecard is as follows:

Cage Traps: 3
Rats:             0



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We're feeding the cats too much

Here's a sure fire way to find out if you are feeding the cats too much Cat Chow.  If you set a trap in the feed room in the barn and catch one almost immediately followed by another... and another... and another and so on and so forth, you're feeding them too much.  The body count is at 9 now since Thanksgiving and counting, and I continue to bait the traps and catch one more each day.  This is not a catch and release program.  Those boogers love pecans - that's what I bait the traps with.  The rat death toll rises in inverse proportion to my satisfaction level with our farm cats.  Doggonit.  This is their job.  They've become fat, lazy, and dependent and have allowed the rat population in the barn to grow while they slept on the job.  That ends today.  I've scheduled a performance appraisal with both of the cats.  They are going to have to step it up!


"You disgust me."  " Prove it!"  Okay!  (You've seen that commercial, right?)

This morning we were awakened by Magnolia mooing loudly - intermittently but frequently.  Tricia checked the calendar and sure enough, she's in heat, proving that the broken fence 21 days ago during her last cycle did not result in Maggie's pregnancy by Stryker, the Jersey bull.  This is a good thing.  We want to space out our milk cows' calf deliveries so as not to have 3 cows in milk at the same time.  We don't have enough farm hands around our house for that much activity!


Stryker, the amorous Jersey Bull

 Over the Thanksgiving Holidays, Tricia's mom came in from South Texas for a visit along with one of her brothers from Houston.  We had a nice time visiting, eating, relaxing, etc.  My parents gave me a fire pit for my birthday and I took it out of the box for its inaugural burning.  It was really relaxing to start a nice fire going.  We arranged the patio chairs around it.  Russ pulled out his guitar and strummed a few chords and Tricia's brother, David, played some tunes for us.  Of course we roasted marshmallows and sang and talked until the fire burned out.  I like the new fire pit!



Anyone know any campfire songs?

The weather was just perfect for sitting out by a fire - not too hot, but not too cold.  We burned a lot of the pecan branches from the yard.  A good time was had by all.

I have to show you the camellias.  They are in full bloom right now with a gazillion more buds about to open as you can see in the photo below.


Camellia Sasanqua

I primarily like to grow things that you can eat, but these plants are stunning in their color and beauty that a picture just can't do justice to.  To me, camellias remind me of the South, even though they originated in the Far East.  Their blooms stand out as lots of times, they are the only colorful thing blooming in the Fall.

I'll leave you with a smile, literally.  A breakfast consisting of fresh raw milk, fresh scrambled eggs from the hens topped off with Tabasco sauce, homemade blueberry biscuits topped with homemade seedless blackberry jelly and a slice of bacon (store bought) brings a smile to my face - and my plate smiled back at me!


A happy plate